Editor’s Note: Today the Times Record continues a series of Sunday reports on child sexual abuse — investigating and prosecuting the crime, aiding the victims and preventing abuse. Next Sunday: Prosecutors face challenges; offenders seek children they view as vulnerable.

Not only has the Internet made it easier for people to find and distribute child pornography, but the nature of images has changed in the Internet age, according to an assistant U.S. Attorney.

“Way back, it was still images of a child lying on a blanket with their bottom exposed or (the photo was) focused on their genitals. Now there are actual videos of infants being raped and young boys being sodomized by adults. Those are so heinous and so shocking relative to what it used to be,” said Kyra Jenner, assistant U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Arkansas. “They’re crime-scene photos.”

When she handled her first child-pornography case as a state prosecutor in 1983, Jenner said it involved a few black-and-white photos mailed from overseas in a brown-paper wrapper and was investigated by the U.S. Postal Inspection Service.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Dustin Roberts, who took over primary responsibility from Jenner for prosecuting child exploitation cases in federal court in 2011, said videos have replaced still images as the primary files recovered during child-pornography cases, with suspects regularly having hundreds or thousands of files.

Even in the relatively short time he’s been responsible for such cases, Roberts said violent sexual images have increased and become more common.

“In all but one case (in 2013), there images of prepubescent minors being raped or sexually assaulted. I can’t remember the last case we didn’t get a sentencing enhancement for images of sadistic or masochistic violence,” Roberts said.

Roberts said he’s also seeing more images involving infants. He estimated the average age of children in the cases he prosecutes is between 5 and 7.

“Some children are so young, they don’t even know what’s being done to them is wrong. I’ve seen pictures where the child was smiling,” Roberts said. “Unless it hurts, they don’t know to report it.”

Task Force Covers 34 Arkansas Counties

Roberts said although the Internet increases opportunity for trading, it also provides more evidence for prosecutors and increases the amount of law enforcement dedicated to detecting it.

About two years ago, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Homeland Security Investigations, the Arkansas State Police and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Arkansas created a localized Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force that covers the 34 counties.

HSI Special Agent Scott Crawford said the task force has grown to include six full-time investigators from state and local agencies and two HSI agents.

U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Arkansas Conner Eldridge said he hopes all 34 counties ultimately will have a representative on the task force.

The investigators specialize in in specific areas, like peer-to-peer networks, undercover investigations, social media and forensic examinations, creating a “one-stop shop” for child-exploitation investigations, Crawford said.

Before the task force, federal, state and local agencies worked investigations independent of each other. By bringing state and local agencies into a partnership with HSI, they can be designated federal law enforcement officers, which expands their authority beyond traditional jurisdictions, Crawford said.

Creation of the task force also has largely eliminated traditional turf wars among law enforcement.

“This transcends it to the point it’s phenomenal. It seems like everyone just gets along. Before this (the task force), not much was getting done, but the number of prosecutions has spiked since its creation,” Crawford said.

The federal partnership also brings resources for continued specialized training, which can’t be overemphasized considering the “huge barriers” in technology exploited by offenders attempting to avoid detection, said ASP Special Agent Kevin Richmond, who works full-time on the task force.

Crawford said six or seven years ago, peer-to-peer networks like LimeWire, BearShare and FrostWire were a primary trading venue for child-pornography producers and consumers, but now people use social media, smartphone apps, tablet apps and email to communicate and trade.

Richmond said a big problem now is Kik, a smartphone messenger app that allows users to trade images, with servers maintained in Canada, which makes legal service difficult.

“There’s always something new coming down the pipe,” Richmond said.

Until late 2012, Richmond said it was rare to get a tip about child-pornography trading on Facebook, but that number is increasing.

Trading using cell phones is also growing.

Crawford said they probably examine 10 phones in their lab for every computer they examine. Roberts said he can’t remember the last child-pornography production case that didn’t involve the use of a cell phone.

“When someone is suspected of production, when we execute a search warrant we look closely at phones,” Roberts said.

Internet Provides Meeting Ground

The Internet also has given sexual predators a venue to troll for sexual encounters with minors, which Crawford said is handled most often at the local level.

In 2008, Van Buren police detective Donald Eversole began posing as a 13-year-old girl on the Internet as bait for adults trolling for sex with minors. The department had started the program a year earlier as a proactive response to the issue.

Eversole said he would log in under a profile that included a photo of a girl — who is now an adult — between 10 and 13 and wait to be contacted. He said there are two rules: he can’t mention sex until or arranging a meeting until the person to whom he’s speaking brings it up.

While 9 out of 10 contacts don’t result in criminal activity, Eversole said more than 60 men have been arrested since the program started.

Like in child-pornography arrests, Eversole said when a suspect is arrested, officers seize any device that holds data and get a search warrant for it, and occasionally find child pornography. One man caught in the sting admitted he’d been trading child pornography online for 10 years.

The men who are motivated enough to act on their desire for sex with a minor often arrange a meeting or expose themselves on a webcam, even after expressing suspicion that they’re talking to law enforcement and acknowledging how much trouble they would be in if they got caught, Eversole said.

And like the men arrested on child sexual abuse or child pornography charges, Eversole said they come from all walks of life, including students, business owners and even a 22-year veteran of the Air Force who arranged a meeting from an air base in Turkey ahead of a trip home to visit his parents.

Richmond said the number of arrests for child exploitation on the Internet isn’t a true representation of the extent of the problem, because they’re just catching “the stupid ones.”

But Richmond is still concerned that arrests are so common, people are becoming desensitized because the media can’t include full details of the crime, which they deal with on a daily basis and still struggle with being exposed to it.

Agents’ Work Voluntary

Crawford said counseling is available for employees who work child exploitation, and child exploitation and undercover work are the only two sections in HSI that are voluntary and not held against agents in performance evaluations if they decline the assignment.

Roberts still can’t get the image out of his head of the first child-pornography video he saw, a 3-year-old being raped in a bathtub.

Eldridge said some people have the misconception that possession of child pornography as opposed to production of it isn’t that big a deal.

“Folks that advance that logic don’t know what they’re talking about. These are kids that are sexually victimized, and they’ll be scarred for the rest of their life,” Eldridge said.

The seriousness of the issue wasn’t lost on a person who approached Jenner in a hostile manner in a post office, who had served on the jury of a child-pornography case Jenner prosecuted. The former juror told Jenner prosecutors didn’t prepare them for what they had to see and the images still flashed through the juror’s mind.

“As disturbing as they are for us (prosecutors and law enforcement) to see, jurors are unprepared for it. We are very careful in editing what we show; if it’s a 45-minute video, we try to sanitize it into a 50-second clip. We try to take great care in not overwhelming jurors, but we have to prove what’s in the indictment,” Jenner said. “There really is nothing that prepares a juror for seeing such, revolting disturbing pictures.”

Jenner said the idea that people satisfy their sexual appetite with images of child rape is still beyond what she can comprehend.